The present invention relates to an electronic camera, and a shooting method and a replaying method, which are applied thereto.
In recent years, electronic cameras have been rapidly popularized, and a recording capacity per recording medium for an electronic camera, such as a memory card, etc. has been increasing.
However, with an increase in the recording capacity of a recording medium, images for many shooting scenes are included onto one recording medium, so that it becomes more and more difficult to grasp and manage shot image files.
Generally, shot image files recorded onto a recording medium by an electronic camera are transferred to a fixed or removable recording medium of an external device such as a personal computer system in many cases. Upon completion of the transfer, the recording medium is initialized with entire erasure or a formatting operation, and reused as a recording medium for recording a shot image.
It is desirable that the shot image files transferred from the electronic camera, for example, to the personal computer system, can be handled as a meaningful image file group in consideration of subsequent image processing. Accordingly, application software suitable for image processing is required, which enables thumbnail images to be listed and displayed, enables a shot image file to be easily renamed, etc. Many pieces of such software for image processing, which are distributed with or without cost, are known. However, various problems remain in terms of their operability, functions, prices, etc.
Also a computer system environment for the above described software must be considered. However, operations such as an operation for suitably creating a folder for storing a shot image file, an operation for assigning shooting date and time as a file name, etc., are merely performed to cope with such an environment when shooting is performed with an electronic camera, and a complete solution to the above described problem has not yet been proposed.